Please. Talk about simplistic. In a crisis it is often not nearly as simple as ‘all-powerful’ hero and quivering, incapacitated damsel in distress. Even when people are being helped by others it is not ‘abnormal’ for them to care enough about their own survival to make at least some effort to help themselves or even ally themselves with whoever is trying to help them.

Yes it is normal for people to get scared or frightened, and yes people can be stunned or stressed into inaction. But the damsel of distress never reaches that psychological threshold like most normal people do – it’s her normal, automatic mode of reaction for every and any situation.

And in my own inexperience I know of so few people who became so absolutely incapacitated when facing danger that they simply sat there, wailed at the top of their lungs and did nothing even remotely useful, in the way that the classic damsel in distress does.

Falling down on the floor, shrieking and wailing when somebody is trying to take you out and another is trying to save your ass is not ‘normal’ behaviour. (If you have the energy to do that, then why not do something useful?) Whether successful or not, most people have an instinct for self-preservation where they will at least attempt to flee or try to fight back, rather than collapse in a puddle. You don’t have to be G.I. Jane to put up a struggle.

And yes, people are tired of the fact that if, in reality, people assisting others come in all shapes, sizes, colours and genders then there is absolutely no reason why they are all invariably white and male – as if they are the *only* people capable of helping anyone.

I’m a vet. I know exactly how I’d react in a crisis because I’ve been in a few. And I think only presenting women as damsels in distress is a lot more harmful than thinking a story about a girl that actually fight back. I served with a lot of women and let me tell we can do a lot more than cry and fall.

Wow. Congratulations. Give yourself a big pat on the back, because you know exactly how you would behave in any crisis situation, and you’d certainly be braver those weak-willed women in the comics. You wouldn’t be “willing” to get dropped off a building? Yeah, because you really have a lot of choice in the matter. Give me a break. Do you have any sense of how much this echoes the perverse pseudo-feminism of blaming rape victims for not fighting back? I know you’re making a point about the types of roles women tend to be cast in in these genres, but the way you’re phrasing it sounds extremely thoughtless.

The reason such damsels are in distress isn’t that they’re damsels, it’s that they’re normal people. Super heroes are not only physically, but psychologically prepared to risk their lives to any extreme. Since the genre is packed with this kind of character, it’s easy to forget that their civilian loved ones often have no such psychological preparation. They are just going about their day, with no expectation of encountering danger, especially not at the hands of superhuman psychopaths. Not everyone is an action hero waiting to happen. True, in real life a person without any preparation may rescue someone from a burning building or take down an armed attacker, but they’re the exception, not the rule. That’s why super heroes have secret identities, because the people whose safety they care about aren’t all tough-as-nails warriors. I agree with you that the roles of the heroes and victims (and villains, for that matter) in such stories ought to be more evenly split between genders. But expecting a woman with no martial training to turn into G.I. Jane as soon as a baddie shows up, just because she’s dating Peter Parker, is unrealistic, insulting, and bad storytelling.

Furthermore, as far as empowering women in speculative fiction goes, I think it’s important to show characters who have admirable qualities other than their aptitude for violence. How about female role models with intellectual and emotional bravery, not just physical?

You have an interesting memory. Andre Norton never published as Mary Norton (you may be confusing her with the author of The Borrowers), nor has C. J. Cherryh publihsed as Cynthia Jane (perhaps because her middle name is Janice, not Jane, but even so). Ursula K. LeGuin published a story or two under her initials in Playboy, but other than that has always used her full first name. And just to show how much progress we’ve made, Joanne K. Rowling published under her initials!

As far as your second point goes, Andre Norton had always had “mental powers” in her books. Male writers had often used “mental powers” in their work. Some female writers have stuck with “hard” science, many male writers including old school sf had not bothered with scientific accuracy. And how dreadful, to work on technical basics of fiction writing like characterization, as though you couldn’t develop characters and work on your science in the same work! I hadn’t noticed that “scientific rationality” took a beating in sf, but it sure did in your comment.

Sigh. Why do people just talk bollocks rather than do a little bit of research?
The world’s first ever SF group was formed by New York fans around 1929. They called themselves the Scienceers and among their number were Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger, two names longtime fans of DC Comics will be familiar with. In his history of early fandom, THE IMMORTAL STORM (1954), fan historian Sam Moskowitz
wrote:

“The first president of the club was a colored fan whose hobby was rocketry, and the Scienceers met at his Harlem home. The willingness of the other members to accede to his leadership, regardless of racial difference, has never had an opportunity for duplication, for James Fitzgerald was the first and last colored man ever actively to engage in the activities of science fiction fandom. It is an established fact that colored science fiction readers number in the thousands , but with the exception of Fitzgerald, the lone Negro who attended the first national science fiction convention in 1938 and the single Negro members of the later groups, the Eastern Science Fiction Association and the Philadelphia Science Fantasy Society, they play no part in this history.”

So, the fact there were thousands of black readers of SF was common knowledge
55 years ago, and the first head of the first ever SF fan group was also black.

Is there any valid relationship between the fact that SF&F writers whose novels are published by for profit publishers tend to be outsiders to even their own social ethnic group that a minority group is so alien they are utterly clueless?

In my opinion, SF writers’ alienation from mainstream society (where that is the case; I think that’s a bit of a stereotype) is irrelevant. The ways in which they are defending white privilege are exactly the same as the way mainstream writers, other-genre writers (as you point out), and folks in other media, defend their white privilege. However alienated SF writers might be, they’ve absorbed the messages of racism and white privilege just the same as everybody else.

That said, I can’t speak to Morgan or Williams (never read their work), but there are a lot of white writers who Get It. They tend to be younger writers, though this isn’t always the case — one of the best-known Get It writers is Ursula LeGuin, who must be pushing 80. And the field is changing, slowly, as writers become less tone-deaf on issues of gender and race, and as readers become more demanding. But a lot more work is needed.

Speaking of which, there’s a kind of “roll call” going on right now of online SF/F fans of color. If you’re so inclined, perhaps you could check in?

Aren’t most writers alienated outsiders that report from the edge? Romantic writers tend to write all white stories, white chicklit writers usually only have white chick protagonists, and we don’t even need to get into westerns. If this is the case, then shouldn’t we expect a certain degree of massive stupidity and applaud writers like Walter Jon Williams and Richard Morgan who don’t have it?

I mean I am very saddened that Lois MacMaster Bujold is so dense as to make such assinine statements, but then as a POC who has been reading SF&F since the mid 70′s I never expected much in the way of sensitivity. I tended to look that the misanthropes that lurked amongst the stacks and cons of SF and took it for granted that POC would not increase in the gener until the number of writers of Color increased. (I also had a private theory about black writers and the rise of a true black professional class in US culture, but that’s another story)

I was always happy if the author avoided the blatant racism that David Drake and others of his ilk leaned toward.

That said, please do not take think for one nanosecond I am unappreciative of the current battles you and other writers are fighting for my behalf. You are schooling them and they need to be schooled.

I just was curious if you saw credibility in my theory as why they are so clueless.

Oh, and have you ever read the dedication in Richard Morgan’s newest work “Thirteen” (“Black Man” in the UK)?

Do you have a point, amid the morass of irrelevancy and misogyny you’ve posted here? Please stay on-topic.

Oh, and that was a warning.